Rayons reform shouldn’t worry the hromadas as it is important mainly for the state authorities. Having set a course for decentralization, the state delegates all the powers from rayons to the level of capable hromadas. Thus, the reform having been completed, people will receive all the services in their hromada, including those they currently go for to the district centres. New rayons will be necessary only for the state authorities to organise their supervision over the legality and to coordinate all the executive bodies activity locally.

‘Forming new rayons, we should, first of all, aim at the number of residents but not the centre availability, as hromada residents won’t need to go to the district centre any more as it is the case now. However, state executive bodies will function in rayons, and the pressure on them must be approximately equal in all rayons. That is why the population quantity is such an important criterion. According to our recommendations, based on the European practice, in each of the future rayons there must be not less than 150 thousand residents’, - said Vyacheslav Nehoda, Deputy Minister of Development of Communities and Territories of Ukraine, during a video conference dedicated to forming the administrative and territorial arrangement of the sub-regional level of the Kharkiv, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Poltava, Rivne and Chernivtsi regions, held by the MinRegion jointly with the parliamentary Committee on the Organization of the State Power, Local Self-Government, Regional Development and Urban Planning.